Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan

Author:Tricia Sullivan [Sullivan, Tricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2015-10-15T22:00:00+00:00

Colonel Mustard in the library

‘There goes the neighbourhood,’ I said loudly. Two Phones was pretending not to notice me, so I walked straight up to him. The dogs felt my mood. The male gave a whuffling bark as we approached.

Two Phones didn’t know what to do. He looked right, he looked left. At a loss, he brought one of his phones to the ear that didn’t already have a device in it.

‘How’s it going, Jeff?’ I said.

‘Ms Jones,’ he said. He squared up to me, contracting his delts so that he puffed up the way animals do when they’re trying to establish dominance. This was a mistake. I’m bigger. Plus the dogs.

‘If you have Bethany Collins then let her go,’ I said.

He bent and ruffled Leonard’s ears. ‘Hey, Leonard, how you doing, buddy?’ he said.

‘No, I haven’t seen Bethany today,’ he said. His eyes gleamed behind little crinkles at the corners. There was a faint pink line on his neck. High blood pressure. ‘I was just speaking with Liam, actually. Are you concerned about her?’

The way he said it was odd. He had such a rigid head, I couldn’t get inside his emotional patterns.

‘It’s very clear to me, Ms Jones, that you are working in concert with Dr Sorle, who is a murderer and, in all probability, a fraudster. So let me come clean with you. I work for the oil company that Mr Stevens skimmed for decades. It’s my job to find the money he stole and recover it for my company. As soon as my team found out about the home invasion in Amagansett and the subsequent event over Iceland, we started checking biometric data on passengers and crew. So imagine my surprise when you – supposedly dead – tried to take out cash in Viana do Castelo, where I just happened to be at the time because I was on my way to an offshore rig.’

‘This is supposed to explain why you were creeping around me?’

He laughed. ‘Creeping? That’s not a very nice word.’

‘You didn’t talk to me openly. You sneaked around spying on me. And now you’re following me.’

‘No, you’re following me. I let you go because we had another lead on the whereabouts of Dr Sorle. That’s how I got here to Edinburgh ahead of you, so, sort of by definition, I can’t be following you. I’m not really interested in you unless you do something to make me interested. Right now, you’re making me interested. If you annoy me, I will take appropriate action.’

Up in HD my feathers stood up a little. An auto-shop smell crept up from my own skin, like I was oozing metal and grease.

‘If you had such a great lead on Dr Sorle’s whereabouts, what are you doing following me?’ I said. ‘You know what I think? I think you poisoned Bethany. Maybe you’re trying to hold something over Liam, something to do with this money.’

He laughed, then rubbed Leonard up and down the ribs so that the dog’s skin moved into wrinkles over his muscles.

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